Wednesday, September 19, 2007

VMware Fusion

I just switched from using Parallels to VMware's Fusion product for running Windows (and Windows applications) on my Mac. I love the "Unity" mode of Fusion that allows each Windows application to run in it's own native window on your Mac desktop. It's a bit of smoke and mirrors but it to the users it looks like each app is native.

5 comments:

Actually a couple of people have asked that. I didn't really "switch". I had Parallels on my old company's MacBook, then left and got a new one. I installed the (14 day) trial of Parallels with the intention of buying it myself for this machine, but then read some positive reviews of Fusion before I pulled the trigger. So, I installed the 30 day trial of Fusion and liked it. I still haven't bought either yet... but at this point I think I'll go with Fusion just because I like the "Unity" mode.

My primary complaints about Parallels are it's speed to start up (minutes, much of which has my MBP tied in a knot), and the fact it's using 25% of my CPU even when it's idle (nothing running in the container etc).

I've debated moving to Fusion, may be more motivated if it's kinder to the MBP...

I've tried both and I have to say that even if Parallels uses more juice, it's got VMWare beat on polish and integration. Try the latest build; its much easier to launch windows apps directly in OS X with parallels, and copying files between the two is a breeze. Parallel's coherence mode seems just as good as unity to me. Parallels simply works much better running my bootcamp partition as a VM; Fusion took forever to load and ran slowly, and I couldn't easily access the bootcamp partition while the VM was running.